Underneath

By Joe Nazzaro, From The X-Files Magazine - Issue #3 (April 2002)

John
Shiban was brought in to write starting in the third season, having to
live up to the standards set by writers such as Chris Carter, Glen
Morgan and James Wong, Howard Gordon, Darin Morgan, Vince Gilligan, and
Frank Spotnitz, he had quite large shoes to fill. John Shiban
eventually became a significant member of Ten Thirteen Productions.
There's a degree of candor in this interview which is why it was
chosen. Again, special thanks to Megan from XF Road Runners for the
transcription.

As The X-Files finishes production
on its ninth and final season, writer/producer John Shiban is trying to
finish some of the stories he always wanted to tell. He's just finished
writing and directing Underneath, a contemporary twist on a classic story. He's also collaborated with Frank Spotnitz and Vince Gilligan on Jump the Shark, which ties up some of the threads from the short-lived Lone Gunmen series, and wrote the story for Release, about an unusual genius who may be more than he appears.

The X-Files was the first television job for Shiban, who began writing for the series with The Walk in season three. It wasn't long before he joined the staff, creating such episodes as Teso Dos Bichos, El Mundo Gira, The Pine Bluff Variant, S.R. 819, and Badlaa. He also collaborated with Gilligan and Spotnitz on a number of stories, including Leonard Betts, Memento Mori (with Chris Carter), Three of a Kind, Theef, and The Amazing Maleeni.

Shiban took some time out from his post-production duties on Underneath
to discuss his upcoming Season Nine episodes, some personal highlights
from the past seven years of The X-Files, and his feelings about the
series coming to an end...

THE X-FILES MAGAZINE: Tell us about Underneath, which marks your directing debut on the series.

JOHN
SHIBAN: It's about an old case of Doggett's, a serial killer of sorts
when he was a beat cop back in 1989. Since then, this man was caught
and convicted and is serving a life sentence, but his case was reopened
by a sympathetic lawyer who had his DNA tested against the evidence
that convicted him and found that it wasn't the same person. Doggett,
of course, sticks to his guns, because he believes this is the man, so
he turns to Scully and Reyes to help him prove that he did the right
thing back in 1989. The idea of the story was to force Doggett into a
position where he has to fall back on an X-file to solve a case - will
be believe or not? If he doesn't believe, this guy is going to get away
and possibly kill again, but if he does believe, that means Doggett has
to face a lot of his own world views and what he thinks about reality
versus the X-files, so it's an interesting journey for him.

What was your source of inspiration for this episode? (Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen Underneath yet, you may want to skip the answer to this question!)

Part
of the inspiration (and people will hopefully have seen it by the time
they read this so I'm not giving anything away), was that we'd actually
talked for some time about doing a Jekyll/Hyde story but never quite
found a way to do it until we came up with the idea of DNA evidence,
which is happening more and more these days. 'The Innocence Project'
for example, reopens cases for people, and the notion that somebody's
DNA could have changed because they're turning from Dr. Jekyll into Mr.
Hyde was the heart of this story. So I came up with a character named
Bob Fassl, who is this accused killer, and his problem is he doesn't
know that he's turning into this other person. In his mind, he's
burdened with these killings, and he's actually guilty in a way,
because to him, this strange man, this apparition appears and magically
leaves dead bodies at his feet. In reality, he's turning into Hyde and
killing them and turning back into himself. So we play that mislead for
quite some time in the episode; until act four in fact, when Reyes has
figured out the X-file and that's when we reveal to the audience that
this man is one and the same.

There was another source of
inspiration, which actually turned into a very exciting thing for me,
especially as a first-time director. I wanted to play with the idea
that as a cable man, maybe the people he killed are people that he
encountered at his job way back then. Since he had access to
underground tunnels where they lay the cable, maybe he used them to
hide his bodies. After coming up with the idea, I had the inspiration
of The Third Man. I thought it would be great to do most of act
four as a chase through these tunnels and into the sewer, trying to
catch the bad guy. With that in mind, I went to our location people and
said, 'Can we shoot in some great big tunnels here in Los Angeles?' and
the answer came back, 'No, there's a moratorium on shooting there since
September 11, shooting anything that the DWP controls,' which was
understandable.

So I turned to our art director Corey Kaplan
and said, 'What can we do?' She pulled up blueprints from the 1952 Fox
movie version of Les Miserables, and used that as inspiration.
So they actually built a huge underwater sewer set on Stage 11 here at
Fox, with actual running water and big culverts and waterfalls. It was
just amazing, and this was for a little TV show. There was a big Y
section that broke off into two pieces and had all these arches and
whatnot, so what we did was re-dress it a couple of times to make it
look like different parts of the tunnel in order to use the same
stretch again. It was so exciting to walk onto that giant set,
especially for my first directing effort.

Had you wanted to direct for some time?

I
originally got into the film business thinking, "Gee, I'd love to
direct one day!" and then I fell in love with writing and thought of
that as a path to do it. When I ended up in television - on The X-Files
specifically - it was something I'd wanted to do since I got here, but
watching Rob Bowman and Kim Manners trying to such a complicated show
on eight or ten days of shooting, I soon saw how difficult it was.

Have you finished post-production on Underneath yet?

Because
of actor availability issues on other episodes, I had to stop shooting
for one day, and I'm doing another day in a couple of weeks. So it's
been a while, but there were some scheduling issues, and it was like,
"Okay, let's shut down for a month or two and come back." The set is
still there, but I've already been in the cutting room, and on the
whole, I'm fairly pleased with it so far.

And you're collaborating with Frank and Vince on Jump The Shark, an episode that ties up the Lone Gunmen series.

Today
is actually the last day of shooting. That was a difficult story to
write and to break. We've always loved those characters and a lot of
people love them, so we did want to give the Lone Gunmen their due and
a fond farewell. To do that in the context of The X-Files
turned out to be very difficult, because there was a lot of ground to
cover in 43 minutes. I think we did a nice job of having both a good X-Files story, and paying tribute to and tying up the loose ends from The Lone Gunmen show as well.

In terms of tone, is Jump the Shark as comedic as a Lone Gunmen episode, or is it a serious X-Files story?

On The Lone Gunmen, many of the episodes were quite a bit more comedic than we would ever do on The X-Files. But I think the pilot and the season-ending episode All About Yves were closer in tone to what we're doing here, which is closer in tone to what we previously did with the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. When we did Three of A Kind, or Unusual Suspects, those episodes both had solid X-Files-type
stories, so there was a serious dilemma, and yet these comic guys have
to save our butts. It adds humor to a thriller, and that's the tone of
this episode: it's clearly a thriller, but there's also a lot of comedy
in it. We also brought back the Morris Fletcher character (played by
Michael McKean), from the Dreamland episodes of The X-Files. He also appeared in the season finale of The Lone Gunmen, so in a way, it's a hybrid, but it's also an X-Files episode because most of the characters in it are from the X-Files world.

And you've written another episode this season?

It's
the last one with my name on it, but I actually turned to David Amann
to write it. I didn't have enough time because of everything else that
was going on, so I have story credit on it. It's called Release,
and it's a story I've wanted to do for some time, so I'm glad I got to
it before the end of the season. I'd always wanted to do a story about
Scully encountering a strange genius and you don't know if he's a
mastermind like Sherlock Holmes or if he's Professor Moriarty. Either
he's a brilliant guy who's solving crimes with his amazing intuition,
or he's a guy who's actually doing those crimes and playing a game with
the cops. I've always been fascinated with eccentric geniuses, so we
came up with a story where Scully encounters this genius as a cadet
under her tutelage, and he has these amazing powers of deduction that
truly impress her. The story starts with a murder that he seems to be
almost psychically prescient about solving, that may be connected back
to the death of Doggett's son Luke. For Doggett, it might be a great
opportunity to get some closure and find out what really happened, but
on the other hand, he starts to believe that maybe this guy had
something to do with it.

So what else do you have coming up after you finish editing Underneath?

The
work I did on "Release" will be my last piece of writing for the
season. I'll be involved with breaking the story for the season-ender,
but other than post work - editing and so forth - this one is really my
farewell.

Looking back over your time on The X-Files, what are some of the personal highlights that come to mind?

This is probably an obvious one, but the first episode I wrote, The Walk.
That was certainly my first milestone, because it was such a thrill to
see my work on the screen, and to have it directed and produced and
acted with such a high level of quality; I was just in heaven. So I'd
have to say the first time is certainly memorable. Along the way, there
are certainly a number of episodes that I feel were not only personal
landmarks but for the series as well. Leonard Betts for example
stands out in my mind as not only a great X-Files story with a truly
wild premise, but the fact that we were able to pull it off and make it
seem real was very exciting. It also planted the seed for Scully's
cancer, which led to another milestone, which was Memento Mori.
The four of us got nominated for an Emmy for the writing, which was a
real honor, and David and Gillian's performances were thrilling in that
episode, so it was great to be part of it.

I would say Dreamland and Dreamland II were important. Let me say even beyond that, another milestone for me was Three of Kind,
because that was the episode that proved, at least in our minds, that
the Lone Gunmen could have their own show, which let to a lot of
excitement for us. Unfortunately the show wasn't picked up after the
first year, but I'm still proud of our work on it. So that was a
milestone to me, because it led to a lot of stuff. And I guess the big
milestone (not counting my directing debut) would be last year's
season-ender, Existence. That was a thrilling episode, and it
also starred my son, [who plays Scully's baby] so I've got to love it.
That actually worked out well, because a lot of our relatives back east
hadn't seen him yet in person, so I was able to say, "Watch The X-Files tonight, and you can see him!"

Overall, how would you describe your contribution to the series?

There
are two things, to be honest. I've always been a fan and a student of
the movies and movie history ever since I was very young, so one of the
things I brought to the show was a library of stories and ideas and
images that we could call upon for inspiration. We tried from very
early on to make a different movie every week, and I'd like to think I
was helpful in that because it's something that I've always loved and
could call upon. So that's one thing.

The other thing, I
hope the other writer/producers would concur - there's a lot of stress
involved in putting out 20-something episodes of television. I feel
that another quality that I hopefully brought to the group is a calm in
the storm. It's something I got from my mother, just that sense that,
"This too shall pass, so let's figure out how to solve our problem
rather than going insane!" I think I was helpful on a lot of those
tight corners, making sure we got shows on the air, and I'd like to
think that was partly my contribution.

Have you started thinking about life after The X-Files yet?

My
agents are taking away the luxury of not thinking about it. They're
excited, because they can actually sell me for once. I'd love to have
my own show some day, I'd love to do some feature work, and I'd love to
continue working in television. There are a lot of opportunities out
there, so over the next year or so, I'm going to get back into the
market and see what's going on, but I haven't really pinned anything
down yet. It feels very odd to be looking for a job, because I've never
really had to do that, but it's certainly a great thing on your résumé,
so I'm not concerned. I do realize as I begin to look into other shows
and see what's out there, I'm not sure I'll ever have another
experience like this. The combination of the talented people to work
with, the effort and time and money spent on each episode, all those
things made it a very special time for all of us. I don't expect to see
that again.

Special thanks again to Megan and Please visit Megan's excellent site: XF Roadrunners